California likes to lead. On this one, leading is nothing to brag about.
New industry data released this summer counted 18,327 nationwide intentional attacks on communications networks, the cables, fiber lines, and towers that keep phones and internet working, in 2025. That’s a whopping 59 percent increase over the prior year, affecting 11.8 million customers. California and Texas together account for more than half of those incidents. Los Angeles alone suffered 1,131 attacks, the most of any city in America, and California absorbed an estimated $252.6 million in losses, the largest of any state.
Vandalism against communications systems are not victimless crimes against faceless corporations. When a thief cuts a cable, 911 calls fail, hospital networks and telemedicine go dark, small businesses stop taking payments, and remote workers stop working. In Amador County, cuts to fiber lines severed dispatchers from most incoming 911 calls. A deliberate fiber cut near Sacramento International Airport knocked out internet service and delayed flights. Industry data shows the average outage from one of these incidents lasts 138 hours, nearly six days without connectivity because someone wanted a few dollars of scrap. And often not even that.
Most modern networks are fiber, which contains no copper at all. Thieves chasing copper prices routinely destroy glass strands worth nothing at the scrapyard while inflicting repair costs. Those societal losses ran between $294 million (what customers pay for it, the subscription price) and $1.47 billion (what connectivity is actually worth to people rather than what they’re billed for it) nationally last year. A crime with a worse ratio of private gain to public harm would be hard to design.
Yet, here is what should trouble free market Californians most.
These networks were built with private capital, trillions of dollars of it nationally, without taxpayer guarantees. Unlike regulated utilities, broadband providers cannot recover repair costs from a rate base. Every stolen cable is paid for via higher consumer prices, and by shareholders as capital is diverted from network expansion into fences, cameras, and armored conduit. A state that lectures endlessly about the digital divide is watching theft rings widen it.
The first duty of government is not managing the economy, but rather protecting people and property. On that core function, Sacramento is well behind. Twenty-eight states now classify intentional damage to communications infrastructure as a felony, with Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon, and Virginia joining this year. California, home to more of these attacks than any other state, is not among them. A thief can knock out connectivity for thousands of families and, so long as the scrap value stays under $950, face a petty theft misdemeanor.
Three fixes are straightforward. First, state lawmakers should define broadband and communications networks in statute as critical infrastructure, which federal policy has long recognized them to be. Second, make intentional damage to that infrastructure a felony, full stop. The crime is the outage, not the metal, and the statute should finally say so. Third, close the fencing market.
Other states already require metal recyclers to know where their material comes from. Mississippi bars dealers from buying copper telecommunications wire outright. North Carolina requires sellers to document where and when they obtained the metal. Minnesota licenses scrap sellers. None of this burdens honest recyclers, most of whom already keep records because they do not want stolen goods on their scales.
Credit should be given where credit is due. A new law passed last year tightened recycler documentation as of January. This year, Assemblyman Mark González’s pending legislation on organized metal theft moves in the right direction by creating a new organized theft crime, adds felony exposure, builds a statewide intelligence pipeline and does name the problem correctly.
But documentation rules without felony deterrence treat the symptom and leave the disease. The felony exposure is conditioned on organized conduct and aggregated dollar value of the metal. So, a lone actor’s single cable cut that darkens a 911 center is still petty theft. Missing the point, the measurement of the crime is by the scrap, not the outage, and it doesn’t define communications networks as critical infrastructure.
Protecting property is not heavy-handed government. In fact, that’s a reason to have government. California cannot claim to champion broadband access, digital equity, or the innovation economy while its laws tell criminals that dismantling the networks underneath all three is a minor offense. Time to lead on something worth leading on.
Bartlett Cleland is a senior fellow in tech and innovation at the Pacific Research Institute.